Matt Damon talks about why he stays out of tabloids

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To hear him tell it, Matt Damon is just a regular dude, and that’s why the paparazzi don’t try to play games of gotcha with him. In the new issue of Esquire, Damons say it’s actually his wife, Luciana Barroso, who keeps him out of the tabloids. “I got lucky, I fell in love with a civilian. Not an actress and not a famous actress at that,” said the Cambridge-bred movie star. “Because then the attention doesn’t double — it grows exponentially. Because then suddenly everybody wants to be in your bedroom. But I don’t really give them anything. If I’m not jumping up and down on a bar, or lighting something on fire, or cheating on my wife, there’s not really any story to tell.” It also sounds like he isn’t eager to have his children follow in his footsteps. Talking about child actors, he says, “My mother thought it was child abuse. . . . She was a professor who specialized in early childhood development, and she thought putting a child onstage or in a commercial or in a movie was child abuse. So when I did ‘Elysium’ with Jodie Foster, I asked her. . . . I figured, if anyone’s going to know, it should be her, right? So I asked her. And she sort of smiled and said, ‘It depends on the child.’ ”